Tempest Unleashed (41 page)

Let Kona and Mark go
, I told her in a voice that revealed none of my fear.
And maybe I’ll let you live.

She laughed, and this time there was nothing fake about it.
Let me live? Look around, Tempest. Coral Straits and all of its allies are in shambles. Hailana is one small step from death’s door. The selkie empire has been destroyed. Let me live? I think you have that backward. Maybe, if you are very, very smart in the next few minutes, I’ll let
you
live.

She glanced behind her, to where the shark-men and bunyip eyed me eagerly.
But to be honest, that’s not very likely.

My stomach tightened and terror slid, ice cold, into my veins.
What do you want?

Want?
She shrugged.
Nothing. Look around. I have everything I want right now. And if something else comes up in the future, well then, I have more than enough power to take it. Whatever it is.

Then why am I here? If you have everything you want, why do you need me? Or Mark?
I deliberately avoided looking at Kona.
He can’t help you with anything.

Ah, but he is amusing to keep around.
She floated over to Mark, who was watching everything with eyes so wide I could see the whites all the way around his irises. I knew he couldn’t hear anything that we were saying, which must have made this whole thing even more terrifying for him. Tiamat trailed one razor-sharp nail down his cheek.

I wanted to reassure him, to find a way to tell him that everything was going to be okay, but I didn’t know if that was the truth. Every second that counted down was another second wasted of Mark’s precious air supply.

We have to do something
, I told Mahina.
Mark’s not going to last.

Uh, not to be pessimistic, but I don’t think
we’re
going to last.

Not helping.

Sorry.
She blew out a long breath.
Okay, we need to even the odds.

There’s forty of them and two of us. I’m not exactly sure how you plan to make things more even …

We need to get Kona out of those chains.

Yeah.

How are we going to do that?
Mahina asked.

I have no idea.

Not sure what else to do, I moved forward. Tried to draw Tiamat’s attention away from Mark and back to me. It worked a little too well, as not only did she focus on me, but so did her huge band of henchmen.

Now that I think about it
, Tiamat said as she glided toward me,
I do want something from you, after all.

Of course she did. She hadn’t set up this whole nightmare for the amusement factor alone.
And what is that, exactly?
I shifted so I was between her and Mark and Kona. It left my back vulnerable, but that seemed a small price to pay.

Your blood.

Her hand snaked out and grabbed on to my wrist. She was stronger than I thought, and when she yanked me toward her I didn’t have enough strength to resist. I tried to pull away, but Tiamat was having none of it.

Hold them!
she shouted, and a dozen or so bunyip converged on Mahina and me, some restraining Mahina in the corner, the others grabbing my arms and legs, my shoulders and hips. Offering me up to Tiamat like some kind of ancient sacrifice.

Your mother promised you to me seventeen years ago
, Tiamat said as she leaned over, her red painted mouth gaping macabrely.
And then denied me every time I came for you. That ends tonight. With your blood and Kona’s energy, I will be invincible.

Her grip tightened on my arm as she dragged me—and the bunyip holding me—even closer to her. And then, with one powerful slice of her nail, she ripped my wrist wide open. And began to drink.

Chapter 34

I screamed. I couldn’t help it. Everything inside of me shut down, every thought, every breath, until the only thing left was pure, animalistic fear. My heart raced, my nerve endings burned, my senses blurred into nothingness as endless seconds passed, the most drawn out and frightening of my life. And still I screamed. I screamed and screamed and screamed.

Even as I did, I kept waiting for her to finish, to say she’d had enough or that it was a mistake, that she didn’t really want my blood. Though one of the first things I’d learned down here was that mermaid blood really did give Tiamat power. It gave her beauty and strength and magic, and she drank until the mermaid in question was dry—I had seen enough to know she wouldn’t stop until I was dead. And yet, despite all my knowledge, it had never before occurred to me that one day she would actually come after
my
blood.

Which made me a total and complete idiot. Kona had said that certain people had more powerful blood than others. Why wouldn’t Cecily’s daughter have blood of incredible strength and magic? Combined with the power of Malakai’s son? Tiamat really might end up invincible.

I screamed louder as the knowledge of my imminent death began to sink in. I’d been prepared to die helping the others escape—but I hadn’t been prepared to go out in the opening battle, as the dumb blonde in the horror movie who everyone knew deserved to die because she was TSTL—too stupid to live.

Well, maybe not everyone.

Behind me, Kona and Mark were going crazy trying to get to us. I could hear them even over the shrieks of protest in my head, yelling and cursing and yanking against the chains that bound them. I knew, in those moments, that if they could have gotten free, they would have torn Tiamat apart with their bare hands. Or died trying.

That knowledge calmed me down somehow, let me think even through the scalding pain radiating from my wrist and up my arm. I was bleeding out pretty heavily now, the world around me beginning to grow fuzzy. A large part of my brain was paralyzed, unable to do anything but screech as she drank from me. But another, smaller part kept telling me to do something besides scream, to somehow find a way to escape.

That was the part I needed to listen to.

Ignoring the soft, slurping noises Tiamat was making, ignoring the excruciating pain of being drunk alive, I focused instead on the burning I could feel in my stomach—not pain so much as the touch of gathering electricity. Closing my eyes, I focused on the water, on the electric charge, and began to amass more and more power.

I pulled the energy from the water around me, from the ocean beyond the boat, from the sea floor that beckoned to me. It filled me up, scalded my insides, made my skin boiling hot. I could feel it radiating up from me, but more, I knew the bunyip were getting uncomfortable. Shifting their hands, their stance, moving around restlessly in a way they hadn’t even a few moments before. It was only a matter of time before their skin broke and blistered like the skin of my stomach had—except this time it wasn’t from Scylla’s poison, but from the heat I was making no attempt to hide.

It still wasn’t enough though. I felt like there was more energy to gather, more power to consume, to build.

There were nearly fifty people in the room with me, fifty living beings with life energy of their own. With my eyes closed and my senses seeking, it wasn’t like I could miss it. Before I really understood what I was doing, I started to pull that force inside me as well.

My body trembled under the impact of it all, and I remembered those frightening moments on the beach when I had feared I was going to literally ignite. That I was going to turn supernova and suck everyone and everything around me into the black hole I created.

That fear was back, sharper and more real than it had ever been.

But unlike the instance on the beach, there was nothing I could do to stop it this time, nothing I could do to temper it into something softer, less catastrophic. Terrified, desperate, I had put my body in the driver’s seat and this was the result.

I only hoped I didn’t end up hurting Kona or Mark or Mahina. I reached out, tried to warn them, asked Kona to shield the three of them, but I wasn’t sure if Kona or Mahina could even hear me. I was pretty far gone, my powers stretched to the breaking point. And still the electricity grew.

As if from far away, I heard the bunyip start to whisper among themselves.

Heard Mahina’s muttered
What the hell!
and Kona’s murmured
Tempest, baby, what’s going on?
But I didn’t respond to them. I couldn’t, not now. Everything I was, everything I ever could be was focused on this wild, free, electric being I was becoming. This force that was about to be unleashed.

And still my power grew, until my back arched under the strength of it, until my hair took on a roiling energy of its own, until my whole body finely vibrated with the energy it was filling up with, the energy that it could no longer contain.

A shudder worked through me, a convulsion that started in my feet and shook my entire body in a close approximation of an epileptic seizure—my brain’s response to the overload I was forcing it to carry. Again and again I seized and trembled, until the bunyip backed away in fear, and even Tiamat, who had continued to glut herself on the power cocktail that was my blood, looked up from what she was doing.

That’s when it happened. The second her mouth lifted from my vein, I exploded outward in a burst of energy so great that I blew out the walls of the room, the walls of the ship, had us spinning and turning and lighting up on the ocean floor in a way no one had ever seen before.

The energy blasted out of my body much like a nuclear explosion without the mushroom cloud, encompassing everyone and everything in my path. The bunyip holding me turned to dust from one second to the next, and Tiamat literally went up in flames.

She shrieked then, trying to put the fire out by rolling on the ocean floor that had replaced the boundaries of the ship. And still I didn’t stop the outpouring, couldn’t stop it. It reached toward the other bunyip, toward the shark-men that were attempting to flee in fear. But they had hurt me, hurt Mark and Kona and all those other mermaids and selkies. It incinerated them on contact.

Tempest, stop. Look!
Mahina screamed from behind me. Kona must have heard my request for his protection, and had shielded her, because while her nose was bloody, the skin of her arms and face blistered from my heat, she was still in pretty good shape.

But her burns weren’t what she was concerned about. It was the chain wrapped so tightly around Mark and Kona. It was boiling, almost melting, and as it did, it was searing a powerful brand into their chests and upper arms wherever it touched.

The sight of them in pain reached the small part of me that was still there, that had not ceased to exist in the rage of power and heat that was consuming so much of what was in its path. Forcing myself upright, I tried to rein it in, tried to pull the power back inside myself now that it had done its job.

It was agonizing. Miserable. Impossible. Yet I managed to do it, one small current at a time. Not letting the power go, as I still had more battles to fight, but leashing it, holding it down, wrapping it tightly inside of me.

The second she sensed that the danger had passed, Mahina was across the room, prying the chain from around Kona and Mark.
Come on, we need to get out of here.
I couldn’t tell if she was talking only to them or if I was included in the conversation. All I knew was that every single being still alive in the room—and there weren’t many—was looking at me like I was a cross between the Leviathan and the devil himself.

It barely registered as all hell broke loose.

Sabyn, a huge army of bunyip and shark-men at his heels, hit the ocean floor in a blinding flash. He leveled an energy arrow straight at Kona’s chest, let it fly. Kona intercepted it with a wave of his hand, and it fell, harmlessly, to the ground.

It was the opening salvo in a battle that should have been over in seconds—we were that outnumbered. But somehow, we managed to hang on.

Grouping together in the middle of what had once been the cargo hold, backs to each other, Kona, Mahina, and I faced out in every direction—with Mark in the middle to protect him—and prepared to fight.

Now that I had contained the monstrous energy suck inside of me, I couldn’t release it again. It had burned itself out in that one fiery blast that had gone on and on and on, had burned me out until my control was nothing but a shaky shell.

I could still fight, still shoot energy blasts, but that supernova effect had consumed itself—maybe a little too soon.

Positioning myself next to Mark, who was lugging around an oxygen tank—and two of the guns Mahina had apparently found among the cartons of weapons still in the hold while I’d gone nuclear—we worked together to fight off this newest prong of the attack.

Sabyn and a burned and blistered Tiamat had fallen back, were watching as the bunyip and shark-men charged. Mark and Mahina shot anything that got within a few feet of them—as bullets travel only a short distance underwater—while Kona and I used our own powers to blast the creatures back.